Samuel Richardson

Samuel Richardson Synopsis

This book provides a concise introduction to Richardson, by combining a close reading of Pamela, Clarissa and Sir Charles Gerandison with a discussion of their central themes. An outsider by birth, education and profession, Richardson found common cause with women in a world that needed change. Employing forms familiar to them, letters and tales of courtship and marriage, he urged his mainly female readers to train their powers of reason and morality by debating the issues of his novels. Dr Harris explores Richardson's vision that the relationship between men and women is as politically charged as that between monarch and subject. In Clarissa this relationship is imaginatively represented by means of the characters' archetypes - Evne, Lucretia and queen Elizabeth on the one hand, Sarah, don Juan, Fault and King on the other. In Grandison, Richardson shows men what they must be if they wish to marry women like Clarissa, and argues that marriage, then the necessary female destiny, can only thus be made to work to women's advantage.